Before there was a coast-to-coast Big Ten, there was the Airplane Conference

Under the Southern California sun Saturday afternoon, Penn State and USC will face off in a matchup of two of college football’s most decorated and iconic programs.

The Nittany Lions and Trojans have met before — including as recently as 2017 in a thrilling 52-49 victory for USC in the Rose Bowl — but for the first time ever, they’ll play as conference foes, a once-unimaginable arrangement for two schools separated by 2,500 miles.

The 2024 season has marked the debut of the new-look, 18-team Big Ten. A traditionally midwestern conference that previously didn’t go west of Lincoln, Nebraska now has members in Los Angeles, Seattle and Eugene, Oregon. Even in a sport that abandoned the idea of regionality a long time ago, it’s a particularly audacious experiment.

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It’s not an entirely groundbreaking idea, though. Sixty-five years before Penn State and USC officially became conference mates, there was a plan afoot to bring a similar marriage together.

Long before the Big Ten stretched from New Jersey to California, the Big 12 had members in three different time zones and the ACC had two schools 3,000 miles away from the league’s namesake Atlantic Coast, there was very nearly a coast-to-coast conference in major college football.

In the late 1950s, Admiral Tom Hamilton had a grand vision for what became popularly known as the “Airplane Conference,” a 12-team outfit that would have brought together five schools from the west coast with six others from the east, with Air Force in the middle for an even dozen.

Despite Hamilton’s diligent efforts, the league never came to be and in the decades that followed, college football settled into a structure with which so many became familiar and comfortable.

The story of its rise and fall, though, helps show that the whole concept of what a conference is and what it can symbolize was very nearly turned on its head well before the latest, dizzying rounds of realignment.

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What was the Airplane Conference?

Like the reconstructed Big Ten did generations later, the Airplane Conference nearly came into existence by capitalizing on vulnerabilities out west.

The Pacific Coast Conference (PCC), the entity that eventually became the Pac-12, was teetering in the 1950s, mired by infighting and a series of scandals. Allegations of slush funds and pay-for-play schemes at Washington, USC, UCLA and Cal added to the already simmering tensions between the California schools and many of their conference mates in the Pacific Northwest.

Eventually, the situation became untenable. After the 1958 football season, Washington, USC, UCLA, Cal and Stanford left the PCC and by 1959, what had been the most powerful conference in the western United States had dissolved.

Those moves caught the eye of an administrator thousands of miles to the east.

Hamilton, the athletic director at Pitt at the time, saw the sudden availability of those five schools as an opportunity to create a super-conference that would bring institutions from opposite ends of the country under a single umbrella.

Under his plan, the new body would include the five former PCC members; Notre Dame, Pitt, Penn State and Syracuse, all of which were eastern independents at the time; and Army, Navy and Air Force, the three largest service academies. Various newspaper accounts at the time also mentioned the likes of Duke, Georgia Tech, West Virginia, Miami, Penn and Holy Cross, among others, but the aforementioned 12-team model was the most consistently cited.

While its proposed members lacked a sense of geographic proximity, many of them were linked by powerful football programs. By 1960, nine of the 12 participating schools had at least one claimed national title.

In his book “The Fifty-Year Seduction,” author Keith Dunnavant noted that Hamilton “pushed the idea of creating the most important, most popular, and inevitably most powerful football league in the country, a conference with the clout to challenge the NCAA’s burgeoning influence and cut its own deals with television and bowl games.”

The man pulling strings of the operation was well-suited for the role. Before arriving at Pitt in 1949, Hamilton had been an Admiral in the Navy and was a football coach and athletic director at Annapolis. In 1959, he left Pitt to become the commissioner of the Athletic Association of Western Universities, the conference the five former PCC members created, which better positioned him to follow through on his vision.

As word of his brainchild leaked out into the media beginning in 1958, the proposed league assumed several different monikers. Some referred to it as the “Continental Conference” or the “National Conference.” More than 50 years before there would be an entity with the same name, the Associated Press in one account dubbed it the “American Conference.”

Most commonly, though, it was labeled as the “Airplane Conference.” The distinction came at a time in which air travel had become safer, more affordable and more readily available, helping ease some of the headaches colleges encountered when transporting their teams to away games. Even in a league like the PCC that was confined to the three west coast states, traveling on anything other than an airplane could be a time-consuming hassle, as the Bend Bulletin in Oregon noted in 1958:

“For Stanford, as an example, it was over a 24 hour train trip to play the University of Washington at Seattle. The team left Palo Alto on Wednesday night to make it to Seattle in time to have one workout and play a Saturday afternoon name. Members arrived back on the campus late Sunday or early Monday by dint of close after-game scheduling.”

After the four west coast schools joined the Big Ten earlier this year, they were faced with questions about what kind of detrimental impact hours-long plane rides to the midwest and northeast might have on their athletes.

But what are seen today as concerns were viewed in the late 1950s as solutions. Instead of taking a lengthy train ride from one western city to another, the former PCC schools could simply spend a few hours on a plane each way for road games. As the Associated Press noted in 1958, “By using air transportation, games could be played without serious interruption of academic schedules.”

With modern technology negating some of those logistical hurdles, the Airplane Conference made sense for all parties involved.

For the western schools, it not only gave them a league to join following the PCC’s collapse, but it allowed them to pair up with similarly academically prestigious institutions. Notre Dame, Navy and Army all recruited nationally and joining a league in which they’d be able to play games across the country would only strengthen that status. For eastern independents like Pitt, Penn State and Syracuse, membership in the Airplane Conference would improve their access to college football’s preeminent bowl games.

Even Notre Dame, which cherished its independence and didn’t want to join a localized conference, saw the appeal of being a part of a national league.

“If all the schools mentioned were to organize, we certainly would be interested,” Notre Dame athletic director Ed Krause said to the San Francisco Examiner in November 1958.

Motivations for the Airplane Conference went beyond bringing like-minded universities together.

The discussions between the 12 schools came at a time when professional football was becoming increasingly popular, particularly in areas where many of the Airplane Conference’s would-be members were located. As the thinking went, creating a super-conference that would regularly feature nationally televised matchups between some of the sport’s best programs would demonstrate that college football’s worth.

“This conference, I believe, can be a real shot in the arm to college football by proving that the college game, too, is good,” Captain Slade Cutter, Navy’s athletic director, said to Sports Illustrated in 1959. “By forming a conference of schools with uniformly high academic standards and uniformly good football teams we can prove that academic excellence and football strength can go hand in hand."

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How plans for the Airplane Conference fell apart

Ultimately, Hamilton’s dream failed to become a reality.

While the plan for the Airplane Conference was coming together, leadership had changed at Cal, USC and UCLA, where new administrators weren’t as keen on the league as their predecessors.

The three service academies presented their own challenges. In December 1959, General Gar Davidson, Army’s superintendent, said joining such a conference would “bring new pressures that serve no purpose.” Multiple outlets at the time and in the years that followed reported that the Pentagon vetoed the idea.

Without Army, Navy and Air Force, the concept of the Airplane Conference collapsed and by September 1961, USC president Norman Topping publicly declared that the proposed league was “out of the question.”

“There is only one way the Big Five could expand and that is along natural geographic lines that would include schools in California, Oregon and Washington,” Topping said. “The animosity between various individuals that led to the breakup of the old Pacific Coast Conference has just about vanished. Time has helped to heal old wounds and most of the officials of the schools involved are now gone.”

Indeed, the time apart had softened those once-hard feelings between the PCC expats. The five-member AAWU added Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State and with it, what soon became known as the Pac-8 was born. Hamilton would serve as the conference’s commissioner until 1971.

More than 50 years later, the league he oversaw was decimated — by something resembling the conference he sought to create.

“That conference could have changed the face of college football,” Tom Hansen, Hamilton’s former assistant and the longtime Pac-10 commissioner, said to Dunnavant in his book. “Tom had this vision of creating something that could have been a real dominant force.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Before there was a coast-to-coast Big Ten, there was the Airplane Conference